Richard Siegel and Blanca Gudino, 39, were arrested on Wednesday after detectives found more than 2,800 LEGO boxes at Siegel's Long Beach, California, home.
Exactly! Just like we eat a bowl of popcorns or a plate of rices or pastas with beefs or porks, maybe with a nice glass of wines, teas or milks. After that we can go to the beach to play in the sands or if it's winter we stay in and watch the snows.
over 2,800 boxes of LEGO sets, each ranging in price from $20 to $1,000.
Not to be reductive and at the risk of pissing off Lego fans, how much could those $1000 sets cost Lego to make? We're talking about plastic bricks that must cost a fraction of a cent per brick.
Legos are very cool but they seem ridiculously overpriced to me. Especially now that they're getting fans to design things, so they can't even claim any sort of R&D going into it.
I'm not going to disagree they're overpriced, especially the bigger collector sets, but they are built to insanely perfect tolerances and that's never cheap. Use any generic blocks and it's easy to see Lego manufacturing is on another level. In addition I've built countless sets and despite thousands of tiny pieces I've only had one piece missing, once. And customer support sent out that piece immediately, no questions asked.
I believe much of the cost comes from the standards they hold themselves to.
Bootleg Lego are the saddest thing. They have cool designs but the pieces not being built with the same precision makes them a shore to build. Assembled pieces just don't hold together and it becomes an unfun disaster.
Some things just need that level of insane precision and consistency to work well and comes at a cost.
Estimates vary but seem to be between 5 and 10 cents per brick.
Lego definitely makes a profit, but they also haven't done the usual thing for a business to do, make the product cheaper to squeeze more out of it. In fact, one of the reasons to choose lego over another is the tight tolerances they have for their Legos, they fit better and hold better than a knockoff.
So like, yeah, business, they're trying to make money, but its not the clear-cut fake inflation thing going on, or even necessarily price gouging, as far as I could determine. Its more, this is what a quality product costs, they haven't cheaped out, but it just feels so prohibitively expensive because people aren't paid enough in general.
That’s not exactly true, the manufacturing quality of LEGO has gone down in recent years after moving much of the manufacturing to China. For example, you’ll find more parts with ejection marks in them today than you used to.
Ironically there are a few good Chinese knockoff brands with superior quality now.
Agree on the bag. Disagree on the currency. If Legos were used as currency then it would be totally logical if still completely stupid. Even then, there's human labor involved in making a quality bag, but every Lego brick is exactly the same and made by a machine out of a penny's worth of plastic.
Each box is easily worth 1-2 hundred. On the low side. They’re legos. and some of those sets are the limited-time only sets
The falcon sets are all 500+, if I’m reading the thumbnail right (paywall, erg.)
If we assume 100 per, that’s still 300k in value. “It’s just plastic”… might be a legitimate reason to not buy the sets, but c’mon. You wouldn’t knock collecting art (“it’s just canvas and paint.”)
Are you comparing mass-produced plastic machine made pieces to art? I will absolutely agree that you can make art with them, but at the end of the day we're talking about plastic trash injected into a mold. If you want to get me to somehow defend a company that sell s plastic waste for a massive premium, it just isn't going to happen.